Posted while deciding on my film dinner. Eventually I went with Tourneur's La Main du Diable (1943).

“I don't care about your barley. Or, your vines! Or, your new terra!”

– Karen

Karen – “Karin” in the opening credits – is a displaced Lithuanian woman in an Italy-based refugee camp. She meets an Italian military man bivouacking on the other side of the barbed wire and decides to say yes when he proposes. When the newly-weds leave for home, she finds to her dismay that he's a poor Sicilian fisherman from #Stromboli; a magnificent active volcanic island home to a small Catholic parish. Again displaced, Karen is confronted with herself more than with the others that share her faith.

“Here we are, poor wretches, in this hell, Condemned to tyranny.”

– Antonio

Roberto #Rossellini's Stromboli (Terra di Dio) is a peculiar melodramatic Italian/American hybrid that seems to strongly dismiss the Italian aspect. The significance of Struògnuli – the Sicilian name for the volcano – and the people's faith connected to the volatile mountain and the surrounding sea is presented as primitive superstition. That the Sicilian dialogue – song, prayer, life – remains untranslated and the locals' broken English is used as comic relief adds insult to injury.

 

Otello Martelli's photography excels when he manages to tear himself away from Bergman's face. Only when we're confronted with the magnificence of Struògnuli, the gifts from the ocean, and the greatness of nature we'll be able to understand why the island is man's home.

Office worker Josef K. is brought to trial and at no point told what he is accused of, if anything. Orson Welles' Le procès is an adaptation of Franz Kafka's unfinished 1914/15 novel Der Prozess. The manuscript, guarded from Kafka by his friend #MaxBrod in an attempt to keep the self-doubting author from destroying his work, was against K's wishes posthumously (re)assembled by Brod without the latter knowing the intended sequence of the loose pages nor what chapters were finished.

“All these fancy electronics, they're all right in their place, but not for anything practical.”

– Uncle Max

The story holds up in its vagueness thanks to the quirks of #Kafka's Brotberuf; Franz K. was a trained lawyer, working as an insurance agent in an impossible artifice world of reports and precise wording. Within its extended logic, a man can get perplexedly lost, either within the walls of his #office or one's bed.

Inmates preoccupy themselves with making cardboard boxes. While working together, talking, gaining trust, plans for an escape unfold.

“Hello. My friend Jacques Becker recreated a true story in all its detail. My story. It took place in 1947 at La Santé prison.”

– Jean Keraudy as himself

Le trou is based on a real prison escape and introduced by one of the men involved, Jean Keraudy.

Rome's EUR was Italy's site for the 1942 World's Fair, and meant as a showcase for #Mussolini's then-20 year old fascist state. Due to the outbreak of World War 2, EUR was never used for the Fair. Instead, the Italian Republic restored the project after the war and – quite appropriately if I may say so – turned it into a business district.

“Your new society sounds charming.”

– Dr. Robert Morgan

An idealised, hypermodern interpretation of Classical Roman architecture, EUR feels alien and inhumane and serves as a perfect backdrop for the events a last man on earth may come up against.

 

Besides in The Last Man on Earth, EUR makes an appearance in Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962), Bertolucci's Il conformista (1970), Antonio Pietrangeli's Io la conoscevo bene (1965), and Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect (1987).

Not a film you can be prepared for, Padre padrone. The author, Gavino Ledda, hands a stick – that stick – to the actor who plays his part. There we are, in Sardinia, beautiful Sardinia. A boy in class, learning. His father barges in: the boy must attend the sheep, or else. From that moment on we become that boy Gavino. Life's cruel on the island, but his father, his master, is worse. But that's how it is, there's sheep to herd. When Gavino enlist in the army, he encounters a new world. The precise world of electronics, other people, other sounds, the Italian #language. When he returns home, he finds his father a small man.

“Don't laugh at Gavino. Hands on your desks! Today is Gavino's turn. Tomorrow will be yours.”

– father

In a 1977 New York Times article the Taviani's are cited as seeing Gavino in the same light as #Truffaut's L'Enfant sauvage (1970) and #Herzog's Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) (1974). However, the Sardinian boy's outsiderness is not caused by estrangement, but an immense loneliness that cannot be put into words. This is why Ledda's newfound language is such an important tool. It's not a stick, or a fist, or a dead snake. It's the foundation of his Home.

Monsieur #Hulot – who in his final appearance happens to be an automobile designer – travels to a car show in Amsterdam to demonstrate his latest creation, a camper van par excellence. The vehicle of course accommodates the latest gadgets, such as a collapsible grill.

“Where are you going, Mr. Hulot?”

However regarded as a lesser #Tati, Trafic, is another display of lovingly choreographed insanity, notably a #CarCrash that makes me wonder if this was Tati's attempt to transpose Godard's Week-end (1967) into a pleasant, pre-May 68 France.

The opera world is in mourning. Edmea Tetua, the greatest singer of all time, has passed away. On a grande ocean liner, her friends, colleagues, admirers have come together to scatter Edmea's ashes near Erimo, the island where she was born.

“This is the funny thing abut sea voyages. After a few days, you feel as if you'd been sailing forever. You feel you've always known your fellow voyagers.”

During a tour of the ship, the passengers visit the boiler room where – urged on by the engine room crew – an impromptu operatic competition unfolds, all to the pulsating rhythm of the steamliner's bloated belly.

Hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon) coolly drives a #Citroën DS 21 to his garagiste (André Salgues), who routinely switches the license plates in a beautifully wordless, efficiently lit scene.

“I never lose. Never really.”